White space and rank

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White space and rank

saha_m

11:08 am on Aug 31, 2004 (gmt 0)

I have removed the white spaces from my html

from

<html>
<body>
</body>
</html>

<html><body></body></html>

After this change my rank went down , from 4 to 11.
Is there is a reason for this?

jetboy_70

11:42 am on Aug 31, 2004 (gmt 0)

It seems *highly* unlikely that doing this has anything to do with a drop in search engine ranking.

Lord Majestic

11:53 am on Aug 31, 2004 (gmt 0)

The only thing whitespace should matter about is overall size of HTML page - that is, if you stuff it with 100k of whitespace then chances are it will be ignored. This is extreme and should not happen often. As per HTML spec a series of whitespaces in a row will be treated as one, so it should not matter in the slightest.

Small Website Guy

6:23 pm on Aug 31, 2004 (gmt 0)

Whitespace and returns are only used by the human looking at a site in Notepad.

I can't think of a logical reason why Google would penalize a site without whitespace, because I'm sure its spider knows how to figure out what text is part of the visible page and ignore the rest.

If the Google engineers discovered that spammy SEO'ed websites with nothing but affiliate links often had less whitespace than quality sites, I wouldn't put it past them to penalize the sites without whitespace. BUT... I doubt there is any such correlation.